The amount of content readily available to a user over a network, such as the Internet, has increased almost exponentially over the past several decades. Moreover, there is little indication that this rate of increase in available content will not continue in the foreseeable future. Providers of such content include blogs, news sources, sports sources, weather sources, libraries, friends, universities, businesses, and the like. Much of this content is provided in the form of user-generated content and activity. For example, user-generated content can include photos that a user uploads to a photo sharing service for sharing with friends or family. User activity can include joining an online group, creating online relationships, or winning a fantasy sports league.
In some cases, web services that maintain databases of user-generated content and activity allow these databases to be searched, such as by a web crawler or other Internet search utility. Typically, however, user-generated content and activity is created at a rate that greatly outpaces the frequency at which a database can be searched. Consequently, search utilities can often return results that are quickly outdated due to new user-generated content and activity being added to a database. In addition, many types of user-generated content and activity are not readily accessible via conventional web-searching techniques. For example, user-generated content can exist in the form of a user's status, such as a user's mood, location, on-line availability, or avatar configuration. User-generated content such as this changes almost regularly, and it is readily searchable. Thus, locating many types of user-generated content remains a challenge. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others, that the present invention has been made.